The reason for the error is pretty straight forward, i.e. the table doesn't exist, so I guess the real problem is 'why isn't the table being created during the installation process?'. One thing I did notice is that the number of tables successfully created prior to this error is exactly 50, but I'm guessing this is simply a coincidence as I can login to the mysql server as the same user and create tables manually.

Yeah, I did play around with an earlier version actually and I did get a weird caching problem when I tried to install this version, the installation script was trying to include files at the old installation's location. Rebooting apache seemed to fix that problem though and it isn't fixing this one. I've removed and re-made the root directory completely, cleared all the relevant files I could find out of tmp and rebooted apache but it is still happeing.